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I’d been deep down the Vietnam rabbit hole back at Massey University — spending days in front of the heater in our student flat, reading up on it all. Now I was revisiting it at Auckland.
I hadn’t been alone down the rabbit hole. By 1966 we all knew about French Indochina, and how the Japanese had evicted them during World War 2. We’d heard of Ho Chi Minh and General Giap, and how the Viet Minh had beaten the French again at Dien Bien Phu. We’d read about the de facto partition on the 17th Parallel, and seen the monk Thich Quang Duc burn himself alive while seated in the Lotus position at a downtown Saigon crossroad.
We’d learned about the early days of US involvement, the Domino Theory, the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and escalation under Lyndon Johnson. And we’d got to know the names of McNamara, Westmoreland, Henry Cabot Lodge and the rest. We’d wondered if things might have been different if President Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated.
This was the first American war to be televised. Access for television crews, journalists and photographers was more or less unrestricted, meaning that over the years we got to see and hear about Khe Sanh, the tunnels of Cu Chi, the Tet Offensive, the bombing of the Ho Chi Minh Trail and North Vietnam, Agent Orange, Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, the My Lai massacre, and what Napalm did to Kim Phuc as a little girl.
Australia and New Zealand both sent troops to support the Americans, as did three of the potential “dominoes” — South Korea, Thailand, and the Philippines. But the response from a lot of young people like me was simple — “Hell no, we won’t go!”
Visiting Vietnam for a few weeks twenty years later put flesh on those political bones. The Vietnamese had suffered dreadfully but the country was rebuilding and bustling. We learned to call Saigon “Ho Chi Minh City” and how to launch ourselves across its busy roads like swimmers in a river.
There were still lingering American and French influences — Russian in the North — and we met a few people who’d fought for the South and suffered since. But the country seemed ready to move on. There was little or no enmity to our white faces. And there were plenty of returning American veterans, generally restrained — looking for redemption perhaps, or to satisfy their curiosity. We rented a car and driver from the California-raised son of an American soldier. This young guy had returned, found his Vietnamese mother and set up in business with her.
A section of the Cu Chi tunnels had been enlarged so we tourists could crawl along them. We wondered how men and women could possibly have lived down there — the entrances cancealed in case of enemy patrols. No smoke, no smells, no evidence left on the ground overhead — not even trampled vegetation. And how could the Viet Cong forces have crawled down them — not for metres, but for miles — to attack Saigon.
We recoiled from the horrific booby traps they showed us. But what were we supposed to fight them with, they asked.
We felt for the American soldiers too, who had to patrol the paddy fields and the jungle, wondering who they could trust in the villages, avoiding ambushes and the booby traps. And the tunnel rats who had to explore the unfamiliar tunnels and fight the enemy down there.
Vietnam made it easy for me to empathise with the Chinese Communists — the looming threat that the U.S. saw behind the North Vietnamese. I read Edgar Snow and the New Zealander Rewi Alley. I was familiar with the heroics of the Long March, the romantic figure of Mao, the consolidation of the Communists in Yan’an, the alliance with the peasant masses, the eviction of the Japanese from China, and the subsequent establishment of the Communist state in 1949.
Then, in 1966 Chairman Mao launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. “Bourgeois elements” had infiltrated the government and society with the aim of restoring capitalism, he said, and he called on young people, mobilised as the Red Guards, to rise up and resist this subversion of the Communist state.
I was subscribing to a Chinese weekly whose name I can’t recall. It was filled with heroic stories and photos about rebuilding China. I also had an English translation of Mao’s Little Red Book, filled with quotations, printed by the million and waved in thousands by the young at rallies and in “struggle sessions” against their elders, the educated and the discredited.
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Writing those words is like walking through mud in gumboots. I find it impossible to imagine my state of mind back then. I saw everything — everything — in moral terms. Agatha Christie was OK. Sure there were murders, but usually just a few. Her stabbings and shootings rarely left blood on the ground. Poisonings were numerous but restrained — not much frothing at the mouth. But I detested James Bond because he was amoral and lecherous. And I never went to demonstrations — and still haven’t — because I distrusted crowds. I even backed the Aussies against the All Blacks — because we always won and they never did. Just not fair.
Actually I never really studied Chairman Mao — probably only nodded approvingly at the odd quotation. And I only browsed those weeklies. I suppose I saw the Red Guards as expressing a well-meaning, passionate desire in young people to create a new society. Who couldn’t be on their side? Who wouldn’t support their rallies? Just as we support them today.
Well, maybe you do. I’m less prudish now but I’m just as distrustful of crowds, including young crowds.
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So what had happened?
I met Heather and the fever broke. I’m reminded of a day back when I was still at school. It was during the summer holidays — haymaking season — and I was waiting in our barn with one of the neighbours for the next truck to arrive for unloading. I was spouting off about God knows what.
“Ian,“ the neighbour said, “One of these days you’ll get laid and forget about all that.“
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When I met Heather she might have noticed one of those Red Chinese magazines on the couch in my Mangere sleep-out, but after months on farms that was pretty much in the past. Not foresworn, just forgotten. More likely I’d have been reading Zorba the Greek, or Colin Wilson’s The Outsider, or listening to Sergeant Pepper on my portable plastic turntable.
I’d always been a passive sympathiser, never an activist — never gone to a protest, still haven’t. I owned a copy of the Little Red Book but there was no way you’d find me marching in a crowd, raising it high. Back then the barracking of crowds at a rugby game was enough to make me uncomfortable.
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So it was ironic to find myself a year and a half later studying Communist China in Stage 1 Political Studies, and enjoying it! Watching the communists contort the language. Raising up the masses by doing their thinking for them. Pushing them into communes. I’ve sounded off about that elsewhere.
I enjoyed reading about the Great Leap Forward and the Hundred Flowers Campaign and the Cultural Revolution back then, but it’s a bad dream again now. The endless campaigns and slogans. The hysteria and the struggle sessions and the public humiliations. Like a 2020s social media culture war but more fun — you could banish people to remote collective farms, not just get them fired.
The battle against the Four Olds was a Red Guard staple — old ideas, old culture, old customs, old habits. Heather and I’d had our very own Down to the Countryside movement by then, so that was a start.
But my favourite as I write this page is the fever that broke out after Mao gave his blessing to the humble mango by gifting some to a Thought Propaganda team. Suddenly everyone was into giving and receiving mangoes, the latest thing.
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And then, for a chaser in Stage 1 we had Soviet agricultural policy.
In 1954 Kruschev enthusiastically began a crash program of corn and hog farming. In three years the corn acreage increased fivefold…
Unfortunately, much of the acreage was “unsuitable for corn” and the program was “pruned” after Kruschev’s downfall.
Our life on the farm had been comparative bliss. Even my father’s experiences as a kid might have seemed pretty appealing.
Strong hearts and hands moulding the lands
All over earth, they toil.
Naive, sure, but not as naive as the young Marxists, always hoping to do better next time.